also requires shifting away from the progressive agenda that has made so many cities unliveable: from bans on energy sources such natural gas and a refusal to crack down on crime to the usually miserable state of urban public education.
I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Probably the biggest factor in the deterioration of urban schools is white flight to those suburbs that Kotlin likes so much and the resulting loss of tax revenue.
Edit: I don't see why people are getting so irritated at my using the term "white flight." As far as I can tell it's the only recognized shorthand for this demographic trend.
> I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda.
Especially since it's overwhelmingly due to failed social policy and our pathetic social safety net. Neither of which can really be laid at the feet of progressives (though, to some extent, is Democrats' fault! Disastrous '90s welfare reform was done with the support of Clinton and other dems, and they spent a long time supporting the also-disastrous drug war)
WIC, SNAP, Medicare, and Medicaid were supposed to end poverty. Why didn't they? Why does creating new programs in addition to these solve the problem of poverty when these programs failed? How much money needs to go towards welfare before it will achieve its goal, as a proportion of GDP? How can that money be distributed efficiently, and can you find historical examples of societies solving poverty? What about societies that tried to solve it?
> I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda.
At this point, "progressive" in the context of education means everything from a Montessori education, to the re-animated body of Paulo Freire teaching a critical pedagogy curriculum as he attempts to brain wash the next generation of Red Guards.
Those are two vastly different things, yet they would both be called "progressive" in today's language. Also alarmingly, the people advocating for the latter are the most likely to dress in "progressive" clothes.
I think what he’s referring to is the tendency to lower the average result in favor of reducing disparity. Opposing school choice or the famous example of NYC getting rid of honors programs.
To be fair, the article is not a criticism of the left. And someone on the left shouldn’t feel too defensive - virtually all major cities have liberal leadership. The source said of any failed policy is going to be a liberal policy.
“White flight” is a term that means a specific thing, same for gentrification, neither are meant to represent ALL movement into or out of an area, that’s hyperbole.
I use the term "white flight", I'm apparently a dictator restricting freedom of movement. I come up with a new term, I'm a wokist who wants to destroy the English language. Why don't you just tell me what thoughts I'm allowed to express?
IDK man, NYC survived decades where people got randomly shot on the street and there were crack dealers on every avenue.
It's also hard to paint a gloomy picture since there are probably 10s of millions of Americans who would move to NYC in a heartbeat if an exodus of families really happened and brought with it a corresponding drop in rents.
It’s important not to confuse the ratio of demand to supply, which is high for cities like NYC, with demand in absolute terms. Only a quarter of Americans want to live in any kind of city, much less the densest, dirtiest city in the country: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/americans-pick-country-over-cit...
The aspirational american city is not the extremes like NYC or SF. It's the verdancy of places like Charleston, New Orleans, Ashville, ... That kind of gentle density and mixed use are wonderful city environments that much more than 25% of people would want to live in. And which is achievable in pretty much any neighborhood build before WW2, if only we allowed for it.
In America, people believe there are only two ways to live: Manhattan high-rise or suburban McMansion.
My pet social theory is that an unbelievable amount of our societal woes stem from this false dichotomy in the American mind, and the cities we end up designing because of it.
I see the fall of the American empire the same way as the end of Moore’s law, in that I’ve been reading about their imminent demise since I was a kid.
What ends up happening is that things mostly change, to the point of being hard to recognize. The Roman Empire is not completely gone, Latin and the Christian faith are extremely influential still.
Your second point is well taken, but there's a lot of pain in between even if those worried can take refuge in their culture continuing.
To your first point, I think this is a case of trying to predict when, not if. The article calls out the year of Edward Gibbon's book: 1776. An Englishman in 1776 would be right to recognize their empire was in decline. Looking to Rome's decline makes sense. But from 2023, we mark the end of the British Empire as about World War II, which makes this smell like analysts predicting a market crash will come without an argument for when.
It was not particularly pleasant for most people during the empire. Dickensian London was not particularly great. It was not great either for the rural poor in England, or the locals in India. Or the slaves and small farmers in the Roman Empire. We rarely think about the losers when we idealise an empire.
> And of course, even though the British Empire is no more, we’re writing here in English :)
And Latin was spoken for centuries after the end of the western Roman Empire, even as the eastern part completely reverted to Greek. These things tend to lag a bit.
Joel Kotkin has made his career on being an urbanist who champions the suburban development pattern. He's a contrarian in that sense (that's cool!). He's also the archetype of the home owning californian boomer (that's lame!).
Over time, he's always shifting the supports of his thesis. For the longest time, it was that urban development was inherently more expensive compared to single family homes. Then it was that the market showed a revealed preference for suburban housing because there was more suburban development (points at sunbelt). Now it is the collapse of urban office real estate. Five years from now it'll be something else.
This screed has almost no use of or understanding of actual Roman Empire history and reads like your Fox News loving (as-opposed-to Washington Post loving) uncle’s Facebook rant.
Agree with the premise here. Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore. I live about 2.5 hours from Chicago... and it is a shell of its former self. Crime is a real problem. What is the draw anymore? Expensive, overly regulated, poor public education, crime, poor public transportation...
Chicago has bad optics and also, 2.5h from Chicago is rural Illinois. Their public trans is decent, especially if you're commuting in. You have Metra, CTA bus and rail. Sure, some are inefficient and there are transit dead zones but the spots that work are amazing. Cycling has improved a ton.
Also, education sucks everywhere. I wish I had more experience with charter schools. I demoed one a few years back and it was radically different than anything I've seen. Kids were moving, listening to music, reading. It was nuts and this was in the Austin area, a neighborhood I'd consider ghetto. I'd imagine I'd of thrived in that environment.
As for crime, again, it's an optics thing. There's been a surge of certain crimes and one offs but the only times I've been victimized in the city was because I was being a privileged idiot like being oblivious on the Green Line, getting off the Blue Line on Cicero and walking around or being confrontational.
Other than that, I've always flown under the radar and was never once victimized in Little Village.
As for over regulation, will all the changes I've seen in the city, it's hard to say what regulations you're talking about. If it's the Wrigleyville hotel you're thinking, good. Screw that. Soldier Field should have also not happened. Glad that the George Lucas museum never happened. I think all Chicagoans can agree on this.
As for expense, it's expensive everywhere. I know I can't get a good haircut outside of the city so at least when it comes to food and haircuts, I get my money's worth.
Parking we can blame on Delay for the next 100 years.
> the only times I've been victimized in the city was because I was being a privileged idiot like being oblivious on the Green Line, getting off the Blue Line on Cicero and walking around or being confrontational.
It's your fault for being victimized because... you let down your guard for a bit, and you walked around in a place?
edit: seriously if there's an area you can't walk around in safely, it's a problem with the area, not with you.
This just reminds me of the mayor of London saying terrorist attacks are just "part and parcel of living in a big city" or the mayor of SF saying the tent cities and drugs are a feature, not a bug.
If at any point you're being victimized for "existing in a part of the city", that's a problem! The bar doesn't need to be so low that as long as you aren't murdered it's "just an optics problem".
> Not sure what the attraction of downtown urban areas are anymore
I like the part where they're not the suburbs. Dreadful places those. Can you imagine living in a cookie cutter house surrounded by a useless plot of land that you aren't even allowed to use and where every other person is just a cookie cutter version of yourself? Dreadful.
I live on a suburban pipe-stem that connects to a trail system which itself connects to multiple lakes and the neigborhood pool. In the backyard I've got a zip line\trampoline for the kids and my dog can go wild. There hasn't been crime in my neighborhood for thirty years. During the fall I have campfires with my kids...Is that really dreadful? If people look they can find some paradise-like environments in the suburbs.
> There hasn't been crime in my neighborhood for thirty years
Oh come now. Not a single little tax evasion, domestic dispute, custody case, HOA rules violation, improperly maintained vehicle, or DUI in 30 years? Not even a noise violation from a motorcycle with after market exhausts? I don’t believe it.
Reminds me when drivers complain about cyclists breaking the rules of the road all the time without the self awareness that they break the speed limit every day.
> Can you imagine living in a cookie cutter house surrounded by a useless plot of land that you aren't even allowed to use and where every other person is just a cookie cutter version of yourself?
Then... don't? Many of us live in suburban cities that do not match that description at all, and love it. If you want to live in a dense urban environment, go for it. I think all the noise and human waste would be dreadful, but I can't speak for you.
Almost all of the new ones are like that. Go look around Phoenix. And they look "nice" for a brief period. Just wait until the legacy costs catch up with them. If you go look at the older master-planned communities in far-flung suburbs, they look as bad if not worse than any urban blight.
A pre-war suburb is an entirely different thing than a burb built in the 80s. Generally, urbanists love the prewar burb in America, their criticisms are of the postwar burbs.
The one sentence gist is that they were built to be more walkable (not everyone had a car) and people used land more diversely (most of our crazy zoning wasn’t invented yet).
How it looks in practice is a fun rabbit hole to go down.
Looking at things from a world political point of view the right comparison has always been of America to Athens. Thomas Paine said that "what Athens was in miniature, America will be in magnitude", and he wasn't wrong. The Persians and the Spartans were like the CCP and the USSR, while Athens was like the U.S., the Delian League was like NATO, Athens making Delian League members contribute ships and oarsmen or tribute being not too unlike the U.S. demanding that NATO members spend a certain percentage of GDP on their militaries, Sparta was a super-slave power, but Athens also had slavery, just nowhere near as bad as Sparta and of a fairly different character, etc.
In the end Sparta allied with the Persians to defeat the Athenians and thence Athens was a superpower no more. Then the Thebans wiped the Spartans from the face of the Earth. Then the Alexander and his Macedonians wiped the Thebans from the face of the Earth, and that was the end of ancient Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic period.
The analogies to the Peloponnesian wars aren't great if you pick nits about the order of events (Athens and Sparta fought the Persians before they fought each other, but the U.S. fought the USSR and we're in a sort of cold war with the CCP now), but otherwise the resemblance it's truly uncanny. Not that it helps predict the future, mind you, but that so far the resemblance is something else.
If anyone came here looking for actual analysis of how Roman history can inform us about the situation in the US I would recommend this review of Mortal Republic by Edward J Watts (The book itself is also very good)
Here I thought this would be an article about how (following in the footsteps of Ancient Rome) the US has hollowed out its great cities by squandering too many resources for far too long on imperialist pursuits that only benefit a tiny slice of the population. Instead it's Fox News Grandpa talking points about "progressive" policies in Democratic cities.
"Rome" has been the go-to comparison to "bad thing happened in this place, and therefore bad things will happen here" for centuries. It's usually as ignorant about Roman history as it is about current events.
It's always seeing a point and drawing a curve. It's absurd to think that you could make any predictions based on a single point of comparison -- even if that comparison was actually well-informed, which it rarely is.
So I wouldn't even go looking for that article comparing the US to Rome. If you're interested in sociology, you'd want to compare it to many nations over many centuries, and seeing what actual patterns form. Anything less than that is just going to be exhibiting somebody's bias about what they thing the bad things are, and cherry-picking an illustration.
If you find such an article post it; I'd like to read something about that. Maybe it could also address the idea that economies based on exploitation are inherently unstable...
Because it’s a well known fact that Rome shrunk because of those damn liberals and their totalitarian walkable cities…
There is nothing of substance in that essay. He paints the cities as criminal socialist nightmares and suburbia as carbon-free utopian bliss, which is exactly what he claims “the urbanists” do except with the roles swapped. Yes, urban sprawl is terrible for a lot of reasons. (Some) people like it because they want massive tacky houses but it is still terrible. And it will get more and more terrible as fuel prices increase. It’s also a form of ghettoisation where poor people are stuck in their run down neighbourhoods for a lack of free time, money, and public infrastructure, which leads to the exact problems he pins on evil liberals (concentration of poverty in some areas, crime, lack of investment, etc). He bangs on about crime, putting London and Paris in the same situation as Los Angeles and Chicago (lol), without any thought about long-term trends in crime statistics.
I wish Americans could look outside their borders at what is done in the rest of the world instead of wringing their hands as if they were the only ones on earth grappling with this sort of problems. Particularly someone who’s ostensibly paid to think about urbanism for a living. You can have moderately-sized cities that are perfectly liveable, ideal for remote working, with not that much crime and without that endless, soul-destroying suburban sprawl that buries entire countries’ worth of natural ecosystems under asphalt and concrete. It’s not even that difficult.
“Rome was once mighty and fell; New York is mighty and therefore will fall” is a tired trope, a non sequitur, and not particularly clever. No argument is given as to how the latter could happen except “the liberals” increasing crime somehow. Rome was sacked several times. New York won’t be eternal, but it is more at risk of rising sea levels and increasingly dangerous storms than barbarians at the gates. Or indeed liberals in the city.
This is yet another low-quality opinion piece from this source. People live in cities because suburban and exurban commuter towns are bland. Conservatives have been predicting the death of the city for decades at this point
Note that you swapped out the word "cities" with "states". You can disagree with the premise of the article all you want, but the highest crime cities are mostly run by Democrats, mostly. When you choose where to live, you typically pick the city, or the neighborhood, not the state.
That being said, I have no plans to move to Alaska...
States have more power, the variable differences between rural and urban offer a much clearer picture of what's actually happening beyond the population differences.
So I disagree with your framing, it's fair to focus on states here.
I don't know him. He implied he wasn't aware of the things I said. I speculated that perhaps if he paid more attention and took a deeper look he would see the truth of what I said. What part of this is having a beef with other people? What part is making up shit about him?
You said that he was dog whistling, implying you have some knowledge of his intent which is not evidenced in his words, which he himself is unaware of. And now that you've erased my doubt that perhaps you do know him, I can safely conclude that you were making shit up about him.
I thought you were talking about Georgelemental, sorry. I'm talking about the genre of "Democrat big cities are hell holes"in right wing media. Maybe you don't read much so don't see them repeated over and over. Many people have stopped reading in this day and age
You didn't address "right wing media", you addressed Georgelemental because you have a gripe with right wing media and conflated Georgelemental with that.
I read media from the left and the right. That's how I understand the dog whistles from both sides. I'm retired so I have a lot of free time. Look up Marc Elias. I'm an Independent but I'm considering the Forward Party
Just letting you know that "there's way more crime in blue cities than red cities" to "I want to disenfranchise millions of voters" is an incredible leap.
The more likely conclusion they're drawing is "Democratic policy is a failure and here's the evidence".
Most people are normal. Most people aren't radicals trying to remove the right to vote of millions of people - yes even Trump supporters don't want people in cities to lose the right to vote, they just think they are stupid / voting for bad policy.
It's not about taking away the right of everyone in the city to vote. That's absurd. It's about subtly restricting the right to vote by targeting those in cities. For example, you might restore the rights for felons to vote in a state, but not those whose crimes involved a hand gun, which would target city dwellers. That sort of thing. I'm not invested in it enough to go deep into it like Marc Elias and crew, but I get the idea.
It doesn't seem they are talking at the state level at all, but at the city level. Even cities in red states may actually be blue. For example, they laude Tampa, which has a totally blue city council.
Violent crime isn't limited to murder. Wikipedia has very nice charts and lists for both violent crime rate and murder rate. The results are not clearly biased to any political camp but do trend by poverty and density.
"Republican-leaning red states tend to have less wealth and receive more federal government funds than they pay…Policy choices may partially explain this relationship…"A really conservative state might choose to tax itself at a lower rate, which means by default, they can give fewer state-funded services… "That can exacerbate the situation.”
Blue states are subsidizing red states, red states that have socioeconomic problems largely caused by red state policies.
Sure, fewer services can be one of the many socioeconomic factors. And of course the states with the highest per capita income (more industrialized blue states) end up providing the bulk of the funding.
But as others have said, this divide is not that clear cut. There are states with higher murder rates that are Democrat and states with lower rates that are Republican. Of course the definition of what category a state falls in is also up for debate (presidential vote, governor, legislature, combination?).
"socioeconomic problems largely caused by red state policies."
Can you elaborate? It seems a lot of the issue with economics and opportunities is not just something that can be legislated away. You can see a lot of this is geographically concentrated looking at the county level rates and likely has a historical basis, such as how the south has been a primary sector producer while the north was a secondary sector producer. In the transition to a tertiary sector economy, it's pretty obvious which group gets left behind.
So is DC a "red state"? Why does California have insane crime? What is going on in Chicago? Why is most of the midwest, which leans quite red, the safest part of the country alongside the very blue upper eastcoast?
California was the biggest receiver of federal funds for a long, long time. It does not seem to have made a difference positively or negatively in it's violent crime rate. Texas has always paid more to the Fed than received, yet we have our own very violent cities (and some of the safest ones).
Of the ten most dangerous US states in 2023 (Alaska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina, South Dakota, Michigan), seven are red states.
By your own admission, intentionally excluding DC, red states don't lock out blue states for the most violence.
What do Alaska and New Mexico have in common that makes them such dangerous places? It doesn't seem like it's their politics.
Utah, a deeply red state, is one of the ten safest states. Politically Utah looks a lot more like that deep south than Vermont, another extremely safe state.
Joel Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute. His new book, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, is now out from Encounter.
I don't think the last of those is part of any progressive agenda. Probably the biggest factor in the deterioration of urban schools is white flight to those suburbs that Kotlin likes so much and the resulting loss of tax revenue.
Edit: I don't see why people are getting so irritated at my using the term "white flight." As far as I can tell it's the only recognized shorthand for this demographic trend.